Monday, February 11, 2008

A Pretty Little Snow

This weekend a pretty little snow fell on the mountain. This is not as it should be. February should not bring pretty little snows.

February normally brings snows that routinely close in on 2 feet deep. February normally brings snows that are as heavy as concrete, and snows that can't be plowed and have to carted away in dump trucks. February brings snows that drift towards the top of my back door. February snows can close the roads for so long that kids are bored out of their minds and are screaming to go back to school so they can hang with their friends.

A pretty little snow is so...so... November.

But it is mid-February, and all I got is this pretty little snow that lasted a but a few hours. The feeder birds didn't even bother to go into a feeding frenzy.

Still, the weekend did provide some interesting weather weirdness. Saturday night lightning was so bad on the mountain that they closed the slopes, but I never heard a single clap of thunder. When I first saw the lightning as I was out walking around with Dog, I thought someone skiing on the nearest slope was taking a photo with an extra bright flash.

On Sunday, the wind turned mean and fierce, with gusts over 50 mph, and sustained winds in the 35-45 mph range. I lost power (briefly) 5 times. The power went out so often for a few hours that I stopped trying to reset my digital clocks until I was sure it wouldn't happen again. I didn't get online because the outages fried 2 computers (that I know of) at Roundtop, and I didn't want that to happen to my home computer. All that excitement and I never even left the mountain.

Note: Due to my own klutziness, I have managed to delete instead of publish all the comments about the weird red light in my last post. I am not ignoring you folks, truly, my hand just (somehow) jumped at the last second and all the comments got rejected. I'm sorry about that. I'm not sure if I needed more coffee or had too much.

About Me

I live in a cabin in the forests of Pennsylvania. I write about what I see and do in the natural world around me. I've been a hawkwatcher for more than 20 years, a birder for longer than that, and a crayfish-catcher since I was a polywog.